


Europe Catches Cold

by bachlava



Category: Lost
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-22
Updated: 2011-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:51:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bachlava/pseuds/bachlava
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before his encounter with Sami in Paris, Sayid worked in a restaurant. What was his life like outside of work?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Europe Catches Cold

**Author's Note:**

> Canon through 3x13, "Enter 77."
> 
>  
> 
>  _Whenever Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold._  
>  -Klemens Wenzel von Metternich

Sayid has no reason to concern himself with learning much French. He plans on staying for only about three months, or four at the most. If he gets lost, there are better methods of finding his way again than asking; the name on the documents he signs isn’t his to worry about. When he needs to speak to customers at work, most of the words are familiar: direct loans, or else cognates with English. Only a few confuse him:  _Les boissons. Le pain. Le miel. Les pommes de terre._  Most days he brings leftover food home from the restaurant; it spares the necessity of negotiating a French market, and of spending money he would be wiser to hoard.

His apartment is in Aubervilliers. It’s little more a single room on the eighth storey of a post-war municipal building. One of his contacts in Milan recommended it to him: the landlady is old and more than halfway to deaf and senile, always short of tenants and unlikely to ask questions. She doesn’t mind that everyone pays in cash and huddles away from other people in the hallway, didn’t raise an eyebrow at the scantiness of legal documents included with Najeev Ajam’s application. She won’t be surprised when he disappears without notice in another month or two.

The area is an unsafe one. Most evenings there are street fights, thefts, vandalism: petty crimes, mostly. Once or twice he’s walked past a police-flanked coroner’s van. He doesn’t allow any of it to worry him. He avoids risks when he can; he knows very well how to give anyone sober enough to attack him the instant and unconscious impression that he is not someone they would benefit by troubling. If his apartment is broken into, there would be little to steal beyond a few clothes, a sleeping bag, and makeshift weights. He buys what English and Arabic books he can find from second-hand street vendors. As soon as he finishes one, he resells it; he forgets it just as quickly.

He walks to and from work, avoiding the metro. It’s seven kilometres between the apartment and Le Portail d’Arabie; Sayid takes in everything he sees and tries to think of none of it. It’s easy at work, when he can focus on mixing spices, heating oil, pounding dough, chopping vegetables. The restaurant is a good place to work: a well-appointed kitchen, discriminating suppliers, culinary standards too high to interest labour-code officials in doing their jobs. Most of the staff are from the Maghreb. Sayid understands their dialect only somewhat better than he pretends, but the similarities between their situations and his are clear enough.

Paris is full of museums. On one of his first days off, he goes to the Louvre. They have some items from Iraq – nothing to compare to the Baghdad museums, of course, whose collections last year ceased to exist. Sayid takes note of Akkadian victory monuments; colossi, winged bulls with the men’s heads; carved illustrations of men going about the labours of myth or of daily life. There’s a goat rendered in blue paint on a painted mosaic, a plain white mask, tablets inscribed in cuneiform at an emperor’s order when Paris was a cluster of huts whose cold and half-starved inhabitants were just beginning to make canoes. There is a door panel from a caliph’s palace, a plethora of table vessels decorated with the most elaborate of designs, a miniature painting of a garden scene. Afterwards, Sayid finds himself unable to recall seeing a single object that wasn’t from Iraq. 

He does no better with the modern art at Centre Georges Pompidou, spending hours looking at a few pieces that he thinks are probably unexceptional, derivative, little but types of postwar genres: gouache-and-paper geometrics; abstracted human figures in metal; photographic portraits. There are brochures promoting a video installation: a Baghdad expatriate and her sisters; memories of their father, a project from before the second invasion. The brochure is as much as he can handle in one day. 

He decides to give up on museums.

Once in a while, when he feels he’s been alone for too long, he goes to Le Marais. Sayid navigates by landmarks as much as street names. He can take a route through what is Chinatown in everything but name, or else walk through the old ghetto, still and now proudly occupied by the most orthodox of Jews, the business signs and posted announcements as likely to be printed in Hebrew as in French. The choice is between making his way through the abodes of old-fashioned Chinese grannies or else impeccably pious scholars of religion. Either one seems to Sayid like a strange path to the bars and nightclubs. 

It isn’t difficult for him to identify the good ones: not the ones too fashionable to admit the proletariat, but also not the ones that are too seedy for him to tolerate, with restrooms like bordellos and patrons unwilling to take the effort of going home first - the ones in Pigalle, mostly. As much of the time as not Sayid would prefer a woman, but he is in no position for courtship, and he doesn’t like to pay. Not that he never had recourse to that, in his life as a soldier –  _you have no other life_  – but the facts of the situation, now, would leave too bitter a taste in his mouth. The nightclubs are preferable. He can pretend, sometimes, if the man has slim hips and thick hair and the desperation is too much for common sense.

No one asks to dance. A beckoning look, a nod of the head, and strangers press their bodies together in time with the aggressive music, less dancing than a rhythmic imitation of what’s in their thoughts. There are a few questions Sayid has learned to recognize in French:  _Voulez-vous retourner chez moi? Parlez-vous français?_  And, occasionally:  _Comment vous appellez-vous?_  The answers are easy: A nod of the head.  _Arabe. Un peu d’anglais._  On the last one:  _Sa – Najeev. C’est Najeev._

He never takes them to his apartment, instead going to theirs. The merest hint of unsafe habits, and Sayid is out the door. He hasn’t survived everything life has presented him this far only to die out of pure stupidity, and often enough he goes home frustrated. But if not…They expect him to be somewhat rough, usually, and he goes along. Not enough to fall back on old ways – he has had to disappoint the few who wanted to be struck or restrained – but enough to lose himself in it. Enough, for the night, to let his consciousness be an animal’s, to be unaware of anything besides the moment’s sensation and physical need, inchoate urges. Twice in a night, if Sayid can have an hour or two’s rest in between, or else another round when instinct and habit wake him at five o’clock. In any case, he slips out the door before the sun has finished rising, while the other party is asleep. He never leaves a note.

He allows his mood to dictate whether he suppresses the feelings and thoughts that boil forth in his mind as he walks home. He became very good at that a long time ago. Sometimes, though, he indulges them, lets them play themselves out. The thoughts tend to be unpleasant ones; he doesn’t feel good. But that inner state can be a distraction that he finds perversely welcome, a necessary departure from the rut of his mind.

In another four or six weeks, he will have left this city. He’ll go to Amsterdam, perhaps; there are seasonal jobs, lax officials, thousands upon thousands of people trying in one way or another to forget themselves. Palma de Mallorca or Barcelona in winter; he can work the same jobs and have the locals overlook him in the crush of tourists, and Vienna next summer, when the whole of Europe is rushing its music halls. Or perhaps another schedule will present itself before then; it makes little difference to him.

Soon enough he will forget Paris, the city and its streets and museums, the job and the nightclubs and his little tenement. It will disappear into the same haze that surrounds Turkey and Greece and Italy before it; other cities will follow it into the same oblivion. The meantime is difficult, sometimes, but other times have been worse, and devoid of the assurance the comforts him now. Soon enough, he will forget everything.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Lost_ is all ABC's; no claim or commerce here.


End file.
